Why RuggedPOD ?

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Percentage of worldwide power grid used for datacenters

Even if major IT players are doing tremendous progress within datacenter efficiency, installations are still huge, and require a lot of power. The number of datacenter project is doubling every 5 years. Looking at Apple, North Carolina plant, the 500,000 sq feet main building is about half the size of the 5 MW solar plant associated with the building reducing by the same amount available lands for agriculture or forest.

Billions of humans are using connected services, social network and data sharing software. Smartphone have pushed newspapers to historical era, and are mostly useless without internet access. Eastern Asia, Africa, South America, and Indian users base are growing fast with strong impact on earth due to climate challenge to deploy in proper conditions datacenters which requires climate control to sustain a clean and safe environment to the computing ressources needed to deliver 24h a day services.

Whatever will be done, new services will be deployed because of the scale reached by major players, and consumer demand.

Unfortunatly in emerging countries, power grid is overloaded, in some cases outdated, and coil is the primary source of energy. Deploying wire networking is also a tough job. Mega datacenters might not be the only one solution due to infrastructure limitations and end user accessibility. There is more and more interest to use a grid approach to deploy the infrastructure in a step by step manner, while it does exist for years within power grid management and telecom.

In Western countries datacenter deployment requires tremendous effort due to legal legislation strengthening with as an impact to lower local actor possibilities to deploy successfull innovation against bigger players who could get access remotly to these regions. In some cases this is increasing countries dependency and reduce there sovereignty. Internet doesn’t know borders and unshared legislation might provide tremendous competitive advantages to some countries while overs might becomes dependant.

What do we propose ? A step forward in computing

A full outdoor solution

RuggedPOD is free of any HAVC systems reducing global energy footprint required to deliver Cloud services to consumer, and dramatically simplfying the global infrastructure required to deploy the solution.

The only climate control requirement is to protect the system from direct sunlight and respect free area constraint between PODs.

Renewable energy ready

RuggedPOD is based on building block approach. Each blocks can’t request more than 1000 Watts (or 1kW) to the power grid with the intend to be as much flexible as possible regarding energy source. This low level of energy request simplify RuggedPOD deployment with renewable energy systems.

Early version of RuggedPOD requires AC current, while a DC version is underway with integrated energy recovery system based on TEG (Thermo Electrical General) technology. DC input will facilitate solar panel integration which could be used to produce the required shade to maintain RuggedPOD into an acceptable thermal envelop.

The small size and sealing of the POD allows it to be installed into unaccessible environement to computing like building roofs which can be easily equipped with solar panel.

Natural Ester fluid coolant

To achieve this tremendous promise, RuggedPOD project has swaped the traditionnal cooling fluid used by the computing industry from air to dielectrical natural ester coolant.

Natural ester are easily produced everywhere in the world, have a low bio impact in case of spill against any other dielectrical liquid coolant. Unfortunatly natural ester have poor fluidity value in very low temp environment this is why RuggedPOD can’t be used currently under -15 C.

Natural ester have good fire protection characteristics, and can last up to 7 years into a RuggedPOD in production.

Why supporting our work and participate ?

Because RuggedPOD is made for you, and can be made by you.

As an Open Hardware project any potential RuggedPOD user can participate to the project, provides feedback to the development team and make evolved it to improve it from generation to generation.

RuggedPOD is a new technology which can change the way internet works and the way you will be using it. It could accelerate Internet expansion in emerging countries with the greenest architecture available today at the best cost.

The development team care about our earth, is working on it’s spare time and need help to sustain prototyping development, as well as market access to make moves the industry into a greener area.

The team needs to be expanded as to imagine usages which haven’t been explored yet, like disaster recovery capabilities, rapid deployment method, or even consumer usage.